Marjoleine Kars, history professor at the University of Maryland College Park, will receive McGill University’s Cundill History Prize for her scholarship on the mystery of the Americas.
Tomi Ohrin, director of McGill’s University Centre for African and African-American Studies, describes Kars as “one of the nation’s foremost, most formidable and most popular historians.” Kars has won many teaching and awards, “both nationally and internationally,” Ohrin adds.
In 1981, Kars wrote her first book, “From Lisbon to Havana,” which inspired subsequent texts on South America. She won the 1987 Bancroft Prize for her biography of “Into the Caribbean” author Alice Hoffman. Her colleague Ronn Thorstad described “Into the Caribbean” as “an ingenious treatment of the author’s biography,” describing Hoffman’s subject as “tall, scholarly, intellectual and brilliant.”
The Cundill Prize, organized since 2015 by McGill’s Centre for African and African-American Studies, recognizes excellence in scholarship on the Americas. Ohrin writes that past Cundill Prize winners include the late Harvard history professor Michael Polanyi and “Fox Weather” author Joan Traitel.